'If the newer designs are uneconomical, older AGR should be continued with.' The fact that Britain failed to export any AGRs would suggest that nobody outside the country found them competitive. If the Brits had built PWRs instead - as the French did at the same time, after abandoning their own grap...

Moltex claim the fast neutrons doing the fission will ignore the ~2% hafnium, while the thermalised ones will be absorbed before they get to the edge of the reactor vessel. They're talking about a thermal spectrum variant now though. Do they have many people working for them ?

Do you have any comment, Kirk, on the Moltex design of uranium chloride salts in solid fuel-style steel tubes ? They claim that some sacrificial zirconium in the mix will protect the insides of their fuel tubes (though not the outsides, which are in a fluoride secondary salt.)

If your core was liquid, and less dense than the moderator fluid, it wouldn't float in the middle, it would spread out in a layer from one side of the vessel to the other, and so contact the walls. This means you'd have to make the walls corrosion-proof anyway. This sketch actually brings to mind on...

'What I am hearing from those that have evaluated their system is perhaps a 10% improvement in uranium utilization over today's PWRs, and likely inferior fuel performance relative to CANDUs.' They should get about a forty percent improvement in efficiency from hotter steam ( ~ 33% to 45% ), and, alt...

'Another early project on power reactors was the development of a fast reactor fueled by molten plutonium and cooled by molten sodium....LAMPRE I (for Los Alamos molten plutonium reactor experiment I) was operated successfully for several thousand hours following initial criticality in early 1961. O...

I'll quote the ' I am a complete novice ' proviso, but it seems the production of new fuel and energy would only have to balance over the longer term, not necessarily even every month or every year. Perhaps you could vary the ratio by using more neutrons for fission when electricity demand is high, ...

For a differing Swiss opinion on the phasing out of their nuclear power, which currently makes about 35% of their electricity, the ' Cold Showers with Doris ' website is pretty trenchant. ( Doris Leuthardt is the politician who has been shepherding the Swiss ' Energiewende ' through their parliament...

'Does the silicon transmute to phosphorus and how would that affect the characteristics of this NiMo-SiC alloy?' Apparently not. The absorption spectrum of 28Si, which is 92% of natural silicon, is only 0.177, better than most metals, and similar to natural zirconium. 29Si and 30Si are stable isotop...

Regarding what Kurt Sellner was saying about the tone of your paper, ' killer apps ' probably sounds a bit bloodthirsty to sensitive souls as well. Haven't thought of a synonym yet, though. It also implies that you've got a solution looking for a problem to solve, rather than working from first prin...

' It effectively turns your spent fuel into early-PWR fuel in small elements.' Sorry, EI, I don't follow you here. I know there was a proposal for burning once-through PWR fuel in Candus, but I thought if you got a high burn-up in a Gen III reactor there would be less fissile plutonium in the spent ...

This survey gives 56 ppm of thorium, plus or minus 6, and talks about uranium content too but without quantifying it. Interesting that the survey was ' communicated by M. King Hubbert ' - the prophet of the Peak Oil crowd.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC221093/